Slate takes a look at the Alaska Parental Consent Act, put into effect by Sarah Palin.

Quoted: Last week, Democrats approved the first black major-party nominee for president. This week, Republicans countered with their first female nominee for VP. From race to sex to religion, the circle of opportunity is expanding.

Emily Yoffee is badass - great piece!

Quoted: A Slate colleague offered this challenge for my next Human Guinea Pig: to see if I could get in shape for the summer. Usually in Human Guinea Pig, I do outlandish things—like make my singing debut or become a paparazzo. But maybe trying to firm up, the kind of firm in which my skin becomes like human spandex, was the most outlandish experiment of all.

Fascinating! Makes sense, though...

Quoted: When the women of Sex and the City find themselves outside NY, they aren't happy about it—until Samantha spots a hunky, half-naked farmer and seduces him out of his overalls. And thus the show discovers what researchers have been documenting over the last decade or more: It's the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is.

Really well-researched article on how (and why) teenage girls are suffering from a disproportionate number of sports injuries compared to boys...

Quoted: Everyone wants girls to have as many opportunities in sports as boys. But can we live with the greater rate of injuries they suffer?

Fascinating story. I had no idea that surrogacy was illegal in many countries, particularly in Europe.

Quoted: Thousands of largely invisible American women have given birth to other people's babies. Many are married to men in the military.

An interesting (and inadvertant) companion piece to the Atlantic Monthly story I just faved. It's a controversial viewpoint, but the writer argues that out-of-wedlock births are creating wider economic gaps between races (and genders). So does this back up the Atlantic's story that for women who want to have children, settling for 'Mr. Good Enough' is better than being a single mother? Personally, I think it's too complex to simplify in the way...

Quoted: According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, teenagers account for only 23 percent of current out-of-wedlock births. That means the vast majority of unwed mothers are old enough to know what they're doing: Unwed births are surging among women ages 25 to 29.

Alarming quote: "At some schools, fewer students are now filling prescriptions for the pill, while more are coming in for emergency contraception and pregnancy tests, according to the American College Health Association."

Quoted: Many women can no longer get discounted contraceptive pills at school, thanks to a congressional screw-up. When legislators passed the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005, they forgot to include college and university health centers the list. (Whoops.)

I think the main reason you're seeing this happen is that surrogacy fees come to about $12,000 in India vs. $70,000 in the U.S. I wonder, though, about the laws around protecting the women who serve as surrogates, as well as how this is affecting the already relatively low focus on adoption in the country...

Quoted: The Akanksha clinic is at the forefront of India's booming reproductive tourism— foreigners coming for treatments such as in vitro fertilization. But the clinic's main draw is its success using local women to have foreigners' babies.